Hi Philip,

First of all, thank you for the article. I started to learn Chinese a while ago, and all the challenges you mentioned are something I have already faced or will encounter in the near future. Honestly, it’s a great relief to know that I’m not the only one who struggles with some tricky aspects of Chinese learning.

My personal list of why it’s so hard to learn Chinese:

• There are no letters. You have to memorize each word individually. According to many sources (e.g. this guide by Hack Chinese), this is one of the key reasons why learning Chinese is hard for English speakers)
• Tones are a big headache for me because they are insanely hard to track if you haven’t grown up with them, especially when a phrase is spoken quickly.
• Some consonants, like q and j, are hard to pronounce and hard to differentiate.

By the way, when it comes to memorizing characters, there is a good alternative to rote memorization — spaced repetition. This technique helps me a lot with the memorization of vocabulary.